


Remember the Past, Change the Future

by Yvi



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Character Background, Character Study, Community: femme_fic, Female Characters, Gen, Minor Character Death, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-17
Updated: 2009-11-17
Packaged: 2017-10-03 04:36:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yvi/pseuds/Yvi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two women look back on their lives. One also looks forward.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Remember the Past, Change the Future

**Author's Note:**

> **Warnings:** secondary character death by suicide (canon)

**I: Adapt**

She remembered a time when life had been different. When it had all looked so simple. Grow up, find a man, marry, have children and watch them grow up to repeat all the stupid mistakes you made.

It hadn't turned out quite like this, had it?

Had someone asked Teena whether she regretted anything about her life she'd be unsure of her answer. There were more than enough decisions she would make differently now that she knew how they had shaped her life. But regret? Regret was a strong word for an old woman. How could you regret the things that had made you the person you have become?

Could she go back and tell her younger self what to do, she would certainly tell her to choose her husband over him. But knowing herself, that would only drive that younger version into his arms even more. Fox thought of her as a fool for it, but she had just been human. Maybe a naïve and stupid human, but a human with needs and wants and dreams nonetheless.

Not that he had fulfilled her needs and made her dreams come true. But he had given her the illusion and that alone had been enough back then.

She would tell her younger self to fight for her daughter. She missed Samantha. The memory of her darling girl, the sound of her voice, the color of her eyes, it became overwhelming some days. And now that she was going to die she wanted to talk to her, tell her she was sorry and get the comfort she couldn't get with her son.

No, she certainly didn't wish anything bad for Fox, she just missed Samantha. Maybe there was some regret there. They had made a pact with the devil and gotten what they deserved for it - but Samantha hadn't done anything wrong. She had just been a little girl.

Teena closed her eyes. It would soon be over. She wouldn't succumb to this disease, she would go freely; even though she had always though suicide was a coward way to go, that you had to fight, if not because you owed it to yourself than at least because you owed it to the other people in your life. But she saw now that she had been wrong. She didn't owe anything, not anymore. And least of all, she owed it to someone else to stay alive.

She had lived a life, longer than many, shorter than others, and had lived it well. It would end here. There was a time when she had clung to a belief in an afterlife, not her herself, but for Samantha, because she wasn't ready to accept that her girl was gone. Just for herself, she had no need for it.

There was no need to go on now. An end, that would be fine with her. It was time to stop looking back and just go.

She opened her eyes. She would not go blindly.

**II: Modify**

She remembered a time when she had been different. When the lines around her mouth hadn't made her look hard and when a smile had more often graced her features. She remembered a time with laughter and big plans and friends. Friends who said they would never stab you in the back any time a better opportunity presented itself.

Diana Fowley wasn't bitter. She could think about times long gone without a bad taste in her mouth. Some days, she missed the faces she'd known from then and the way all the world seemed to unfold in front of them. And then, some days, she cursed those times and the innocence in them because it had all been an illusion. The friends that had sworn never to desert each other had ended up doing just that years later. She couldn't look back without thinking about the deaths and the conspiracies, the detail with which everything had been planned and the ruthlessness with which it had been executed. By her and by everyone else.

Her memory had become tainted with reality.

They said that power corrupted and that absolute power corrupted absolutely. Diana disagreed. For most people even less than absolute power could corrupt absolutely. They forgot their friends, their goals and even their family. She had seen it happen too many times. Had seen it in herself as well. Humans just weren't the most social animals.

She was sure it would surprise other people to hear this, but she didn't resent herself or the choices she had made along the way. She just wouldn't make them again. But who would, given the chance? Who was really happy with the way they had turned out? Nobody she knew at least, she was sure.

Fox? She almost had to laugh at that thought. Fox had so many regrets.

For once, Diana knew that he regretted their time together. He thought she was a bad person, one of the evil shadow figures who played with the fate of the world and the people in it. He never understood what drove her, maybe he just couldn't. He was too different from her to understand her.

Maybe she didn't even understand herself, but she wasn't evil. She just had different priorities from others. Why being selfish had become such a negative thing she would never understood. Every living thing on Earth now came from others that had fought enough for themselves that they could grow up and reproduce. Wanting to survive was not being selfish, it was necessary.

Diana had forfeited her chance to survive, though. She wouldn't make it and she knew it. There was nowhere to left to run to, no place left to hide in.

Death didn't scare her. Ceasing to exist only looked scary from the outside. After all, after that there was just no time left to be scared of anything. Others would take her place, people's memory would fade and she would be forgotten.

Strangely, the thought comforted her.

**III: Change**

She remembered a time when the world had been different. When what wasn't possible never happened and what was unthinkable never occurred. And now she was right in the middle of it all. She saw things that couldn't be true and she knew things that weren't supposed to exist.

And it all had shaped her, as well. Sometimes, when she heard herself talk about government conspiracies and alien invasions she had to pause for a second, trying very hard not to laugh at what she was talking about. _Do you really believe all this?_ a voice in her head would say. The truth was, she did believe. But she didn't want to.

It wasn't that she didn't like who she was anymore. It was just that it would have been so much easier not to be that person. That person who had seen people get abducted by different life forms, that person who had her own memories of that experience.

She remembered that first day working on the X-Files and she could only cringe at the naiveté that she had displayed back then. But being naïve wasn't bad, it just meant you hadn't had all your innocence taken away yet.

Sometimes, when she woke up in the morning there was this blissful moment before reality hit her. The reality in which mankind had been destined for a dreadful fate by a handful of people determined to save themselves. Maybe that was what innocence felt like, like that one moment between sleeping and awakening.

But then she remembered and she got up and she was determined to change something. The world, herself, something. It couldn't stay like this. If the world she lived in now was not something she liked, she had to change it for the better. Dana wasn't one to just sit back and let others do the work, she had to take an active role.

In the last few years, Dana had met so many people that had shared a part of the way to who she was today, on both sides. And many who weren't on one side and whose motives she would never understand. Alex Krycek, Marita Covarrubias, Diana Fowley,... People who had tried to make their way and in many cases, had failed to change anything.

Maybe it was arrogant to think you could change the world. And maybe that thought was just plain wrong and only stopped people from doing it.

It might be easier not to be the person she was now. But that didn't make it right. The woman that stepped into the X-Files office years ago might have been naïve and... simpler than she was now, but it had still been her and she wouldn't be like she was now had it not been for that part of her life.

She couldn't undo the past. She didn't want to, anyway. It was what had shaped her, brought her to this point.

But she wanted to change the future. And she would.

**Author's Note:**

> written for idella in the femme_fic ficathon for the prompt: _the person you've become vs. the person you were_


End file.
